Workshop on Globalization and Fisheries Fisherfolk Say No to
Monopoly Capital's Thirst for Profit

[This workshop is part of the Forum on Land, Food Security and
Agriculture of the Asia-Pacific Peoples' Assembly (APPA) which is
being held parallel to the 1998 APEC Leaders Summit. It is being
organized by PAMALAKAYA (National Federation of Fisherfolk
Organizations in the Philippines) and NACFAR (Nationwide Coalition of
the Fisherfolk for Aquatic Reform - Phil).]

Many of the world's most productive ecosystems are found in
Asia. The region has nine of the world's top fishing nations.
Ironically, the developing countries of the region have not been able
to derive full benefits from their resources. It is rather the
developed and affluent countries which have profited from the
exploitation of the region's resources.

Over the years, the fisheries sector has been on the decline all over
the world, but the solutions that governments, especially Asian
regimes under pressure from global powers, resort to are
liberalization, denationalization and privatization. Lately, fishery
plans under Asian governments have become the center of attraction in
the drive for globalization because Asian fisheries has become
the primary target of Japanese, US and European trade and
investments. Wide open are the opportunities to globalize the
capital and products of multinational and transnational corporations
(MNCs/TNCs) facilitated by provisions of WTO agreements and speeded up
by regional trade blocks like NAFTA and APEC. Globalization,
government leaders and technocrats claim, is the panacea to the woes
of the sector and the poverty of the fisherfolk.

Globalization has given rise instead to the uncontrolled
expansion of large fishing fleets mercilessly devastating productive
fishing grounds with their ever advancing technology and ever present
capital. The result is monopoly of vast waters in the hands of those
who already have the most concentration of capital and the best
of technology -- the MNCs/TNCs -- and the global powers -- the US,
Japan and the EU.

The wholesale commercialization and subsequent disintegration of vital
fishery resource bases are then used to rationalize the expansion of
unsustainable corporate aquaculture operations as a placebo to the
continued collapse of coastal and traditional capture fisheries
production. Worsened is the degradation of the already critically
fragile coastal zone ecosystems. In the end, supposed hopes of `saving
the environment' become naught with the reality of unabated
degradation of coastal and offshore resources and ecosystems.

Globalization renders traditional fisheries uncompetitive
through the systematic manipulation of national programs and policies
to suit the profiteering motives of capital-intensive,
commercially-efficient, high-valued and export-geared fisheries
production. What it results into are highly unsustainable fishing
practices, fishery trade crises, and the uncontrollable price
increases of basic fishery commodities.

The capitalist-imperialist competition for fishery enclaves causes the
vicious depravity of millions of artisanal fisherfolk and the
dangerous imperilment of food security all over the world. But the
very same phenomenon of imperialist globalization that intensifies
global economic and financial crisis strengthens fisherfolk and
peoples' resolve to resist and to struggle to change their
situation.